Lessons

Lesson Info

Getting Started with Adobe Photoshop

Our first class is photoshopped basics for just total beginners the idea behind this class is that your like shaking your head like I need that theo idea the idea behind this gus I kind of how it was born is s o my mom has recently gotten into photography which means she's gotten into photo shot which means she has a direct line to me all day long and so one of the things this is I'm learning a lot from teaching her because what I realize is it's like things that I would tell people like me I just open up the curves dialogue and my mom's like she opens up the kurds dialogue and she's like this is confusing and so over time I've realized it needs to be taught in a different way so the way that I went about this class is I went through some of the key topics that I thought people should know in photoshopped layers are a big one selections are big ones that's two areas where we concentrate a lot but I went through it and then I went through some of the common things and the way that I tho...

ught about it is I'm only going to show tools that I would show my mom so I would never open up the channel mixer and say him I'm just blend channel a with channel b in the composite in l a b mode is what you're looking for the issue with machine she hang up and she has so but so that's why I'm kind of going through this is I'm showing the tools so I know a lot of questions ahead of time like I'm going to show levels and somebody's going to say can't you do the same thing with curves? Yes you could I'm not going to show you every way to do it I'm just going to show you the basics on how to get there and then and then from there you kind of develop a little bit of confidence and things and you can even go in catapult from there so that said, I encourage questions I'll stop every so often and I'll jump in and answer some questions but we're going to get started first thing is and I'll run through this one pretty quick because this is this is not the highlight of the class right but is the interface and wanted just want to get across for everybody is let's call things the same thing so that whether you're watching me or whether you're reading a book or whether you're seeing a video or what rots and somebody else when they say something, you kind of know what terms they're talking about so first thing if you come up here you gotta remain menu appear if you come up here one of the things you're going to see is this this program called bridge so I won't open up bridge really quick how many people use like room okay, so about half a lot of the questions is isn't bridge a lot like light room and there's a lot of similarities between the two what I'll tell you is that if you're a photo shop user, you're still going to use bridge I still use bridge it's more of a browser all right light room light room has latent has a price to get into it you got to import your photos and organize and put him in all that thing like you just don't browse to your desktop and say I want to look at a photo where bridge that's exactly what that is, so if I'm just working on a quick photo or somebody is giving me a photo, I'm not going important in tow light room and do all that on when I do things like this, I use bridge for it as well so bridges is kind of our our little file browser here and then once we get into a photo shop let's just kind of get a quick lay of the land first off we got our menu here at the top we got all of our tools and this is a big one, this tool bar over here on the left hand side, so whenever I say a tool that's, what I'm talking about all right, you're moved to a well, you got your selection tools and if you look inside there it's it's barely visible but every every other tool or so has a tiny little arrow in the bottom right corner so what that is is if you hold down on that tool it's going to show you it's got a pop out with some more so some tools have things hidden inside of them so if you're looking here and you're like he said go to the the spot healing brush and if you look down through the toolbox, you're not going to see the spot healing brush and that's because it's hidden inside of there so that's important knows whenever you see an arrow that means there's a tool and die all right, I'm going to go back here to bridge and I'm gonna open up a photo I want to show you the dialog box it just came up that sounds actually had doesn't really have anything to do with the interface, but this is this is one of the most common things that trips people that are just starting and photoshopped what it does is it gives you this big long message that if you if you just started photo shop, you would have no idea what I still don't know what it means but it says the document blah blah blah has an embedded color profile that does not match the current working space and photo shop, and then it says, what do you want to do? And it gives you all these these complicated answers to it. So I want to make this really, really simple for you guys ninety nine point nine percent of the time you're just going to click, use the embedded profile, all right? So if that happens to you, just use the one that's embedded. What what it means is is that photo shop was set to a certain color space, which right out of the boxes is pretty good for for what you'd be looking for if you open up an image with another color profile in it it's just telling you that they don't match photo shops, working space is different from this document. You just want to keep it as it's easiest way to do it melting your computer's not going to explode your image is not going bad everything's gonna look good, so I'm going to use the embedded profile here. Um, so now we've got her image open let's talk a little bit about quick little difference between mac and pc. If you go appear to the window menu and you scroll all the way down there's, something called an application frame windows doesn't have this in windows you're always in in a frame all right, but on a mac, you can choose toe work outside of that, which basically just kind of spread your interface out and let you see behind it and everything old, hard court, mac users like it a lot of all of our applications today or pretty much built in a frame with your on mac or pc, so I would say, just go make sure that application frame is back on, but on the whole reason why I mentioned that is each time you open up enemy and you saw we just opened a new one, right? Double click and open another one. You're going to see what you're in that frame, they all just get put in tabs. Okay, so they're all in tabs right across the top there, all right, back here under the window menu. If you ever want to see what documents you have open, they're all going to be listed right there at the bottom of a couple other things. We talked about our toolbox. Um, a lot of your tools have keyboard shortcuts, and I watched a little bit of erin's class this morning think you guys were in here, right? And he talked about getting getting used to keyboard shortcuts, so I think I think one of the ways to help you'll get bombarded with shortcuts I can just tell you one that are good to know, which is tools because you're gonna go back and forth those tools so if you're going to remember anything, try to remember the tools like v for the move to all be for the brush tool. Ok, those are your tools. If you hover over, they'll actually give you a little tool tip, and I'll tell you what that that tool shortcut is but here's the trick that wanted to show you if you go to your preferences, go to your photos up when you go to preferences and under the edit menu on a pc um, under general preferences, there is a preference for using the shift key for the tool switch. All right, so what that means is, is if I click b for brush her let's say I click like the healing tools are all under jay by click j it's always going to take me to that top healing tool, but what about if I want one of the ones inside of it? All right, what about if I want the spot healing for us? If I click shift j, which is what that preference told me, it'll cycle through all the different tools in there and kind of see the icon that's changing there so jay is just going to take it to the tool but if you hold down the shift key it'll cycle through that preference let you turn it on and off but I wouldn't recommend I just leave it as the default all right so we got our we got our preference is coming off of the tool lt's whenever you pick a tool let's say it be for the brush tool you're going to see this context sensitive menu over the talker that your options are those air options for each tool it's going to change if I click jay and I go to one of the cloning or healing tools you'll see those options changed so if you're if you're ever watching a video you're watching anything and you see something up there and it looks different from what you have it's probably because of that the tool is different but here's a little tip for this is if if you're new and you're starting out in photo shop you've probably done things and you've gone through and change settings and opacity and all these different things what I would say is sometimes you forget what you change and you're using a tool and it's not acting the right way best thing you can do is right up here in the top left in that corner if you right click there's an option to reset the tool or you can reset all your tools so if something's not working right at the first place I'd go just reset the tool because chancellor there might be some little weird setting in there that you didn't get to and you didn't change and that'll kind of clear everything out um all right panels and pallets so this one I even have a hard time with all these little things over here the layers panel the channel's palin the paddle palate these air called panels that's the official term palate is what it used to be called that everything's moved to a panel but that's what these are so whenever we're talking about a panel or a pal it's the same thing if I say layers panel it's right over here different from the layers menu so that's important to remember but panels and pallets you can move these guys around you can tear him off you can put him in together you could take one and put it right toward the bottom of another one and you could stack them on top of each other photos up we'll let you drag its interface around anywhere that you want some people do that if you have multiple screens some people will put their paddles and pallets on one and then their image on another one so it'll let you do anything that you want if you ever get to the point of no return even go window workspace and just choose reset essentials I'll take everything back to the default that was for what we're looking at, all right, uh, recent work space and then menus last one. So this one's important to that scene, this one trip, people up, you have your main menu at the top here, but there's also a panel men. So if I say, go to the layers panel menu that's this time see this tylo icon that you would never think, even click on it's so small that's the layers panel menu all right, and that'll open up another pop out menu so it's important that if somebody saying go the layers panel menu, that's, what they're talking about versus saying go to the layer menu that's after top, they're not all of them like you're not going to find a filter palette, so you don't have to worry about the duplication there but that's an important one because they're all called the same thing and you hear these menus and you used to see things flying around so it's an easy way, tio keep to keep in touch.